How did a city, once the cradle of dialogues, become a place of Macabre dance?
M. P. Radhakrishnan
SOME REFLECTIONS ON PRESENT DAY THALASSERY
M. P. Radhakrishnan
1
Man is a discourse making animal.
Discourses abound. Of late there have been a proliferation of
discourses on several fronts. Questions remain: Do these discourses
ring true against the catastrophe of contemporary human situation? Do
they have emancipatory potential in them? To tell the truth, most of
the post modern discourses take us to labyrinthine worlds. Scholars
theorise ad nauseum. Often they drive us crazy. The fact remains that
it doesn't require a man of enormous scholarship to bury us in a labyrinthine edifice. The present day world order being what it is, we
are already in a limbo. We need only strip things bare to realise
that the texture of present day life has an oppressive quality. Thus,
interrogative discourses are the need of the hour.
Looking backward in time, we find that
Thalassery has a tradition of vibrant discourses. Those discourses
had a liberating potential. That tradition is in ruins now.
Culturally, Thalassery is a wasteland now. Discourses and counter
discourses were a part of colonial Tellichery. For
all the sickening mystifications of illiteracy, Thalassery's cultural
life had a vibrant character then. Critical awareness was wide awake.
Our cultural heroes were creative dreamers. Their verbal self had
tremendous implications. To spell out truth amounted to actualise
freedom from myriad forms of tyranny. Our freedom struggle literally
unearthed their creative potentials.
Present
day Thalassery narrates a different story. The given scenario has a
nauseating dimension. Intellectual apathy of a unsettling kind is
fundamental to Thalassery's public life today. Thalassery's barrenness
necessarily follows from this intellectual inertia. I said,
Thalassery is culturally a wasteland now. It may be recalled that
Eliot's wastelanders are constitutionally apathetic in their nature.
They are in limbo. They cannot make any choices on earth. Spiritually
they are dead. They are castrated souls.
Since
the seventies, Thalassery has been going through a series of traumas
on the collective front. Killings and counter killings have been the
order of the day. Politics of discourse is in retreat. Politics of
violence has got the upper hand. The macabre dance is masterminded by
the inspired followers of Golwalker and Stalin. Since their
intellectual impotence is complete, they cannot exchange meaningful
ideas. Hence they exchange swords and devour each other. Hundreds of
innocent souls have been hacked to pieces.
The
myth of the fisher-king is central to Eliot's wasteland. The fisher-king's soldiers molest a group of nuns who are in charge of the
Perilons chapel which contains the Holy Grail. The king becomes
impotent. His land becomes a wasteland. The Holy Grail too vanishes.
Thalassery
has become a wasteland
precisely because of the cannibalistic excesses jointly done by the
right as well as the left fanatics. Fisher-king
has no single counterpart in Thalassery.
But there are those who wield
absolute political power here. No doubt they are deluded souls. But
these power mongers have literally molested the virginity of
Thalassery's
collective psyche by manufacturing orgies of violence for a lengthy
period of time. Sheer lust for power on their part made them embark
on this bloody adventure. It all amounted to an unparalleled
conspiracy against Thalassery's
civil society. It's sickening impact is as clear as broad day light.
Culturally and politically Thalassery
became a wasteland overnight.
Back
in the mid eighties I had a call from Kamala Das when kuthuparambu
was burning. She could not contain her tears over the phone. She
spoke like a terribly wounded soul and was eager to meet victims of
violence personally. Such isolated exceptions apart, Thalassery's intelligentsia remains fatally indifferent to the macabre dance. Like
the notorious wastelanders of Eliot they have been absolutely
insensitive to this carnival of violence.
2
How shall we regain the lost fertility of Thalassery's political
soil? Surely, no knight of virginal purity will come to the rescue of
Thalassery's ruling class as in the wasteland of the fisher-king –
Manifestly Thalassery's political mandarins themselves have paved the
way for their impotence. There is no escape from this predicament. As
for the barrenness of Thalassery's political soil, there is only one antidote to it namely mass awakening. Mass awakening has no
substitute.
Authoritarianism is in itself a killer. Both authoritarianism and
fascism are one and the same thing. Looking backward in time, we find
that orgies of violence as enacted in Thalassery were offshoots of
distorted versions of both Hinduism and Marxism. Ironically, the
fanatical spokesmen of both came up with authoritarian versions of
their ideologies. Indian culture in its pristine glory as manifested
in Upanishads cannot be authoritarian in its approach to life's
complexities. Similarly Marxism in its original texture cannot
degenerate into a fascist ideology. Yet paradoxically both Golwalker
and Stalin were uncompromisingly authoritarian in their approach to
those who differed from them. IN reality there can be no point of
convergence between Golwalker's narrow vision and the upanishadic
vision. The upanishadic vision is all embracing in content. All false
distinctions and divisions wither away here (Eliot capitalises on
upanishadic wisdom in the waste land). Golwalker's battle cry has
nothing to do with the integral vision which is basic to Hinduism.
Similarly, human creativity shall be at its zenith in a truly
communist state. But Stalin's version of communism amounted to a
gross distortion of Marx's humanistic vision.
Understandably, the later day followers of Golwalker and Stalin
fought each other on Thalassery's soil for decades. Their mutual
intolerance testified to the fact that both were cut off from the
abiding legacy of upanishadic wisdom as well as the life nourishing
quality of Marx's vision. The spectres of Golwalker and Stalin still
haunt the fanatically minded citizens of Thalassery. We need to
exorcise these ghosts to have a genuinely dialogic culture here.
From 19th century onwards, Thalassery had borne witness
to the emergence of a dialogic culture. The legacy of our Renaissance
necessarily paved the way for this culture. Seers like Sree Narayana
and Chattambi Swamikal, poets like Asan, Edasseri and Vailoppilli,
thinkers like Kesari and C. J. Thomas, novelists like Chandu Menon,
Uroob and Basheer gave new dimensions to this culture. The emergence
of Marxism as a progressive ideology also contributed to its growth.
The dialogic culture does away with false divisions and boundaries.
Life sustaining amalgamations and fusions are bound to take place
here. Art, literature, philosophy and political thinking can flourish
only in such an environment.
Since the eighties, this dialogic culture has been in retreat not
only in Thalassery but in all parts of the world. Established
religions like Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism have come up
with authoritarian versions of their scripts. The global finance
capital also adds fuel to this scenario. Death merchants of
Washington, Lahore, Beijing, Kabul, Tel Aviv and New Delhi have a glorious time. Paradoxically, human awareness is in retreat at this
critical juncture.
Thalassery has been confronting a crisis on the awareness front for
the past several decades. Only men with a bold vision can resolve
this crisis. As for the layman, he allows himself to be manipulated
by the political leadership. The orgies of violence in bygone years
could have easily driven sensitive intellectuals mad. But they being
what they were they were guarded against their expressive self. They
also fled from political sanity which would have persuaded them to
articulate their anguishes in clear terms. At a time even a writer of
M. N. Vijayan's stature bowed down to the crafty lies fabricated by
the political leadership. But the more the political leadership
erected imposing edifices of lies, the more he grew sceptical. In his
later days, he was bold enough to unmask the hypocrisy of the
political establishment. Unlike the political leadership, he dared to
take sides with the truth.
Struggle
of memory against forgetting
As I said earlier, interrogative discourses are the need of the
hour. It would be suicidal to resign ourselves to the fabricated lies
of the contestants. Truth should be unearthed at any cost. In this
context, critical awareness should be wide awake. In his “Imaginary
Homelands”, Salman Rushdie offers penetrating insights into the
relationship between writers and politicians. Rushdie writes:
“Redescribing a world is a necessary first step towards changing
it. And particularly at times when the state takes reality into its
own hands and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its
present needs, then the making of alternative realities of art,
including the novel of memory, becomes politicised. “The struggle
of man against power”, Milan Kundera has written, “is the
struggle of memory against forgetting.” Writers and politicians are
natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own
images; they fight for the same territory”. Rushdie concludes, “The
novel is one way of denying the official politician's version of
truth”.
My question is: Can we have a writer of stature like Chandu Menon,
Uroob or Basheer who can challenge the politican's version of truth
regarding Thalassery's politics of violence? Such a writer can
justifiably deconstruct our political scenario. Let us look forward
to the emergence of such a writing of consequence.
(Paper presented in the National Seminar on "Historicising the Region: Literary and Non-literary Articulations" held at PG Department of English, Government Brennen College, Dharmadam, Thalassery on 25-11-2014.)
